A series of post-war and contemporary art auctions featuring work by Jackson
Pollock and Mark Rothko fetched over one billion dollars in New York last
week, writes Colin Gleadell.

History was made in New York last week when, against a gloomy economic backdrop, a series of post-war and contemporary art auctions fetched over one billion dollars ($1.079 billion or £680 million to be precise) for the first time. Who would have guessed that, when the equivalent sales in the spring of 2009 plunged to $213 million, such a peak would have been reached within three and a half years? As the economist Clare McAndrew told The Daily Telegraph, the world’s super-rich may have decided to put their excess cash into art because they have nowhere else to invest it. But this doesn’t explain last week on its own.

With prices for the world’s top living artist, Gerhard Richter, finally levelling out, it was the earlier generations of post-war American artists that were in the driving seat. Abstract Expressionist and Pop have always been the rock on which the New York contemporary sales are based, but this time there was a greater supply than usual – much straight from collections that had been formed 40 or 50 years ago.

This could be described as the generation factor, as collectors with foresight reach a certain age and decide to sell. A small drip painting by Jackson Pollock, which sold for a record $40.4 million, was part of a collection of works by Abstract Expressionist artists that were bought in the early Seventies by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl, American collectors who are now in their eighties. The collection realised more than $100 million bringing further records for Hans Hoffman ($4.6 million) and Arshile Gorky ($6.8 million).

Over the long term, works by major post-war artists have seen huge increases in value – the enticement-to-sell factor. Mark Rothko’s No1 (Royal Red and Blue) had reportedly been bought for less than $500,000 in 1982 and sold last week for $75 million. A small wire sculpture of a policeman, made in 1928 by Alexander Calder, had been bought in 1995 for $107,000 and sold for $4.2 million.

As prices have gone up for some artists, others have followed in their slipstream. Until last week, the black-and-white, gestural calligraphic paintings by the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline had lagged behind his peers with a top price of $6.4 million. But that benchmark has now been surpassed twice, reaching $40.4 million for a sprawling 10ft canvas.

Although there were fewer record prices for Pop art, the Warhol market was in rude health. His somewhat morbid photographic silkscreen, Suicide, which had been acquired 20 years ago when considered of marginal importance for $132,000, set a record for a Warhol work on paper by selling for $16.3 million.

And then there was the sheer unexpected. Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein after his classic Sixties period had never sold for more than $11 million before, but one buyer defied all logic by paying $28.1 million for a 1995 painting, Nude with Red Shirt.

Time and again, the auctioneers fielded multiple bids on lots. They came from Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East, say the auctioneers, to illustrate global involvement, but the market was driven by American demand. “Here, there has been a new shift in taste,” says Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer. “Wealthy American collectors who used to buy more traditional American painting have moved into post-war American art. In addition, the old contemporary art buyers have been priced out and replaced by new money. It has come in over the last four years unhampered by the memory of old price structures and wishing to be associated with cultural genius.”

And it’s the proven genius of yesterday that is proving the main attraction. Of the 45 artists’ records set last week, the majority were for American artists who are no longer alive. “There was less hunger for the younger generation,” says Meyer.

Notwithstanding, there was a string of record prices for living artists – Jeff Koons, Mark Grotjahn, and Wade Guyton among them – all, with one or two exceptions, like the Brazilian, Beatriz Milhazes, North American.

But the show belonged ultimately to the post-war Americans, seen not, as McAndrew suggests, as “the Old Masters of the future” (as this might imply a far more selective market in waiting for them) but as contemporary art, now.